Fire skt-2

by Kristin Cashore

  She smoothed a salve into the hand very, very gently, wrapped it in loose bandages, and unwrapped the other hand, humming.

  The outer two fingers on Fire's left hand were black and dead-looking from the tips all the way down to the second knuckles.

  The healer, no longer humming, asked if it was true what she'd heard, that Fire was an accomplished fiddler. "Well," the woman said. "All we can do now is watch them, and wait."

  She gave Fire a pill and a liquid to swallow, applied the salve, and wrapped bandages around the hand. "Stay here," she said. She bustled out of the small, dark room, which had a smoky fire in the grate and shutters over the windows to hold in the heat.

  Fire had a vague memory of a time when she had been better at ignoring things it was no use to consider. She had been in control once, and had not sat dismal and wretched on examination tables while the entirety of her guard stood watching her with a sympathetic sort of bleakness.

  And then she felt Brigan coming, an enormous moving force of emotion: concern, relief, reassurance, too intense for Fire to bear. She began to gasp; she was drowning. As he came into the room she slid off the table and ran into a corner.

  No, she thought to him. I don't want you here. No.

  "Fire," he said. "What is it? Please tell me."

  Please, you must go away. Please, Brigan, I beg you.

  "Leave us," Brigan said quietly to the guard.

  No! I need them!

  "Stay," Brigan said in the same tone of voice, and her guard, which by now had developed a high threshold for bewilderment, turned around and filed back into the room.

  Fire, Brigan thought to her. Have I done something to make you angry?

  No. Yes, yes, you have, she thought wildly. You never liked Archer. You don't care that he's dead.

  That is untrue, he thought to her with utter certainty. I had my own regard for Archer, and besides, it hardly matters, because you love him, and I love you, and your grief brings me grief. There is nothing in Archer's death but sadness.

  That's why you must go, she thought to him. There's nothing in this but sadness.

  There was a noise in the doorway and a man's harsh voice. "Commander, we're ready."

  "I'm coming," Brigan said over his shoulder. "Wait for me outside. "

  The man left.

  Go, Fire thought to Brigan. Don't keep them waiting.

  I will not leave you like this, he thought.

  I won't look at you, she thought, pressing at the wall clumsily with her bandaged hands. I don't want to see your new battle scars.

  He came to her in her corner, the stubborn, steady feeling of him unchanged. He touched his hand to her right shoulder and bent his face to her left ear, his stubble rough and his face cold against hers and the feel of him achingly familiar, and suddenly she was leaning back against him, her arms awkwardly embracing his left arm, stiff with leathered armour, and pulling it around her.

  "You're the one with new scars," he said very quietly, so that only she could hear.

  "Don't go," she said. "Please don't go."

  "I desperately want not to go. But you know that I must."

  "I don't want to love you if you're only going to die," she cried, burying her face in his arm. "I don't love you."

  "Fire," he said. "Will you do something for me? Will you send me word on the northern front, so I know how you're faring?"

  "I don't love you."

  "Does that mean you won't send word?"

  "No," she said confusedly. "Yes. I'll send word. But – "

  "Fire," he said gently, beginning to untangle himself from her. "You must feel what you feel. I – "

  Another voice, sharp with impatience, interrupted from the doorway. "Commander! The horses are standing."

  Brigan spun around to face the man, swearing with as much exasperation and fury as Fire had ever heard anyone swear. The man scuttled away in alarm.

  "I love you," Brigan said very calmly to Fire's back. "I hope in the coming days it may comfort you to know that. And all I ask of you is that you try to eat, Fire, and sleep, no matter how you feel. Eat and sleep. And send me word, so I know how you are. Tell me if there's anyone, or anything, I can send to you."

  Go safely. Go safely, she thought to him as he left the building and his convoy pounded through the gates.

  What a silly, empty thing it was to say to anyone, anywhere.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Fire guessed that there was little for a person with no hands to do at Fort Flood. Clara was busy with Brigan's captains and a constant stream of messengers, and Garan rarely even showed his face, scowling in his customary manner when he did. Fire avoided them, as she avoided the room where endless rows of soldiers lay suffering.

  She was not permitted to step outside the walls of the fortress. She divided her time between two places: the bedroom she shared with Clara, Musa, and Margo, feigning sleep whenever Clara entered, for Clara asked too many questions about Archer. And the heavily guarded roof of the fort, where she stood in a warm hooded cloak, hands enclosed safely in her armpits, and communed with the grey dappled horse.

  The mare – for Fire was clear-minded enough now to know she was a mare – was living on the rocks north of the building. She had broken away from Fire's group as they'd approached the fort and, despite the attempts of the horsemaster, would not consent to being stabled along with the other horses. Fire refused to allow anyone to subdue her with drugs, nor would Fire herself compel the horse into confinement. The horsemaster had thrown his arms in the air in disgust. This horse was obviously an uncommonly fine animal, but he was up to his elbows in injured horses and cast shoes and broken field harnesses, and had no time to waste on a recalcitrant.

  And so the mare lived free on the rocks, eating food if it was left for her, finding food if it wasn't, and coming to visit Fire whenever Fire called to her. Her feeling was strange and wild, her mind a marvellous unbroken thing that Fire could touch and influence, but never truly comprehend. She belonged alone on the rocks, unconstrained, and vicious when she needed to be.

  And yet there was love in the feeling of her too – constraining, in its way. This horse had no intention of leaving Fire.

  They spent time within view of each other, their feelings connected by the tether of Fire's power. She was beautiful to look at, her coat soft patches and circles of grey, her mane and her tail thick and long, and tangled, and deep grey like slate. Her eyes were blue.

  Fire wished she were allowed out of the fort. She would like to join the horse on the rocks, and climb onto her back, and be carried away wherever the horse wanted to go.

  Garan came stalking into her bedroom one morning while she was curled under her covers, trying to numb herself to the burning of her hands and pretending to sleep. He stood over her and said without preliminary, "Get up, Fire. We need you."

  It was not said with anger, but it didn't have the feeling of a request, either. Fire blinked up at him. "My hands are useless," she said.

  "What we need you for does not require hands."

  Fire closed her eyes. "You want me to question someone. I'm sorry, Garan. I don't feel well enough."

  "You'd feel better if you got up and stopped moping," he said bluntly, "and anyway, it's not an interrogation we need you for."

  Fire was furious. "You never took Archer into your heart. You care nothing for what happened."

  Garan spoke hotly. "You can't see into my heart, or you wouldn't say such a stupid thing. I'm not leaving this room until you get up. There's a war going on not a stone's throw from here, and I've enough that's heavy on my mind without you wasting yourself away like a self-absorbed brat. Do you want me to have to send a message to Brigan and Nash and Brocker one day, telling them you died, of nothing in particular? You're making me ill, Fire, and I beg you, if you won't get up for yourself, do it for me. I'm not keen on dying."

  Fire had pushed herself to a seated position somewhere in the middle of this remarkable speech, and now her eyes
were open and seeing. Garan's skin was sweaty and he was breathing rapidly. He was, if possible, thinner than he had been before, and pain flickered in his face. Fire reached up to him, distressed now, and gestured for him to sit. When he did, she smoothed his hair with her own bandaged knob of a hand. She helped him to calm his breath.

  "You've lost weight," he said to her finally, his unhappy eyes on her face. "And you have this horrible empty look in your eyes that makes me want to shake you."

  Fire smoothed his hair again, and chose her words carefully, finding ones that would not make her cry. "I don't think I'm moping, exactly," she said. "I don't feel entirely connected to myself, Garan."

  "Your power is strong," he said. "I can feel it. You soothed me right away."

  She wondered if a person could be powerful, but inside be broken into pieces, and shaking, all the time.

  She studied him again. He really didn't look well. He was carrying too much.

  "What is the work you need me to do?" she asked.

  He said, "Would you be willing to ease the pain of the soldiers in this fort who are dying?"

  The healing work of the fort took place in the enormous downstairs ward that was the residence of five hundred soldiers during peacetime. There was no glass in the windows and the shutters were drawn now to conserve heat, which came from fireplaces along the walls and from a fire in the middle of the floor, its smoke billowing haphazardly toward an open flue in the ceiling that led all the way to the roof and the sky.

  The room was dim, and soldiers were moaning and crying out, and the place had a smell of blood and smoke and something else cloying that stopped Fire at the entrance. It was too much like stepping into one of her nightmares. She couldn't do it.

  But then she saw a man lying on his back in a bed, his nose and ears black like her fingers, and only one hand resting on his chest, for the other was gone completely, a stump wrapped with gauze. He was gritting his teeth, hot and shaking, and Fire went to him, because she could not stop her compassion.

  At the very sight of her, some panic inside him seemed to still. She sat at the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes. She understood that he was exhausted, but too distracted with pain and fear to rest. She took away his sense of his pain and soothed his fear. She helped him to fall asleep.

  This was how Fire became a fixture in the healing room; for she was even better than the surgeons' drugs at taking pain away, and every kind of pain was present in that room. Sometimes it was enough to sit with a soldier to calm him, and sometimes, as when he was having an arrow pulled, or a waking surgery, it took more. There were days when her mind was in several parts of the room at once, soothing pain where it was worst, while her body walked up and down the rows of patients, her hair loose and her eyes seeking the eyes of the men and women in the beds who felt less frightened for having seen her.

  It surprised her how easy it was to talk to soldiers who were dying, or soldiers who would never be well again, or who had lost their friends, and were afraid for their families. She had thought she'd already reached her capacity for pain and had no room inside her for more. But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you'd reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.

  She finally began to let Clara into that place. She told Clara what Clara's own grief had been yearning for: the facts of what had happened.

  "He died alone," she said to Clara quietly.

  "And," Clara said, just as quietly back, "he died believing he'd failed you. For by then he must have known their plans to kidnap you, don't you think?"

  "He certainly at least suspected it," Fire said, realising as the story opened in words between them, just how many parts of it she didn't know. It both hurt and soothed her, like the salve the healers spread on her raw hands, to try to fill in the missing parts. She would never know how it had felt for him to be shot by his own father. Whether things would have gone differently if she'd paid more attention, if she'd fought harder to keep him from going. If years ago she'd found a way to stop him loving her so much; if Archer, no matter the strength of his mind or the depth of his affection, had ever been entirely immune to her monster beauty.

  "I suppose we'll also never know what Jod was truly like," Clara said, when Fire, quietly, had conveyed all of these thoughts. "We know he was a criminal, of course," she continued robustly, "and a vicious lowlife, fit to die, even if he is my child's grandfather." She snorted, saying as an aside, "What a pair of grandfathers this child has. But what I mean is, we'll never know if Jod would've killed his own son if he'd been in control of his own mind instead of under the power of that horrible boy you dropped into the mountain, and good riddance. I hope that one died in terrible agony impaled upon a jagged bit of rock."

  Clara was an oddly comforting person for Fire to be with in these days. Pregnant, she was even more stunning than she had been before. Almost five months in, her hair was thicker and glossier, her skin glowing; an extra vitality fueled her usual determination. She was completely alive, which was painful sometimes for Fire to stand beside. But Clara was also angry at all the right things and fiercely honest. And she was carrying Archer's child in her body.

  "Lord Brocker is also your child's grandfather," Fire said mildly. "And there are two grandmothers you needn't be ashamed of."

  "And anyway," Clara said, "if we're to be judged by our parents and grandparents, then we all may as well impale ourselves upon jagged bits of rock."

  Yes, Fire thought to herself grimly. That wasn't far from true.

  When she was alone she couldn't avoid thoughts of home, memories. On the roof, visiting the mare, she fought off thinking of Small, who was far away in King's City, most certainly wondering why she had gone away and if she was ever coming back.

  At night, when she struggled with sleep, Cansrel and Archer kept changing places in her nightmares. Cansrel, his throat torn apart, was suddenly Archer, staring at her just as balefully as Cansrel always had. Or sometimes she was luring Archer, rather than Cansrel, to his death, or luring them together, or sometimes Cansrel was killing Archer, or raping Archer's mother, and maybe Archer found him and killed him. Whatever happened, whichever dead man died again in her dreams, she woke to the same pitiless grief.

  News came from the northern front that Brigan was sending Nash down to Fort Flood and Brocker and Roen would follow him.

  Garan was indignant.

  "I can understand sending Nash here to take his place," he said. "But why is he having done with his entire strategising team? He'll be sending us the Third and Fourth next, and taking Mydogg's army on all by himself."

  "It must be becoming too dangerous there for anyone who isn't a soldier," Clara said.

  "If it's dangerous, he should tell us."

  "He has told us, Garan. What do you think he means when he says even in camp a night's rest is rare? Do you imagine Mydogg's soldiers are keeping ours out late with drinking games and dancing? And did you read the latest report? A soldier of the Third attacked his own company the other day, killed three of his fellow soldiers before he himself was killed. Mydogg had promised to pay a fortune to his family if he turned traitor."

  Working in the healing room, Fire could not fail to learn the things that happened in battle and in war. And she understood that despite the torn-up bodies the medics brought in from the tunnels every day, despite the difficulty of supplying food to the southern camps and carrying the injured away and repairing weapons and armour, and despite the bonfires lit every night to burn the dead, the southern war was thought to be going well. Here at Fort Flood it was a matter of skirmishes on horseback and on foot, on
e group of soldiers trapping another in a cave, quick strikes and retreats. Gentian's soldiers, who were led by one of Mydogg's Pikkian captains, were disorganised. Brigan's, on the other hand, were finely trained to know their responsibilities in any given situation, even in the chaos of the tunnels. Brigan had left predicting it would be only a matter of weeks before they made some kind of significant breakthrough.

  But on the northern front, the fighting took place on the open, flat terrain north of the city, where there was little advantage to cleverness of strategy. The ground and the visibility warranted full-out battle, all day until dark fell. Almost every battle ended with the royal side in retreat. They were fierce, Mydogg's men, and both Mydogg and Murgda were there with them; and the snow and ice were proving to be no friends to the horses. Too often the soldiers fought on their feet, and then it began to show that the King's Army was vastly outnumbered. Very slowly, Mydogg was advancing on the city.

  And of course, the north was where Brigan had gone, because Brigan always went wherever things were going most badly. Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever it was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, "Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!" And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.

  Cansrel would have liked it. Meaningless destruction was to his taste. The boy probably would've liked it too.

  Archer would have reserved his judgment – reserved it from her, at least, knowing her scathing opinion. And whatever his opinion, he would have gone out and fought bravely for the Dells.